It's clear that Camus was a great writer. He was just a terribly wrong thinker. It's hard to read this book because he's so talented but he's just so off the mark. "I am the beginning and the end", he says in this book. Of course your life is miserable and absurd when you think such a thing. Such a shame. ( )

It's quite sad what alleged logic can do to morality or individual conscience. It should now be quite obvious to humanity what dangers arise from the lack of a conscience.

Camus gives us here the confession of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a lawyer turned "Judge Penitent".

"Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell? The middle-class hell, of course, peopled with bad dreams. When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle." (Camus 283)

Google an image of Amsterdam and you will immediately see how true Clamence's words are. Here in the red-light district of hell, at a bar, "Mexico City", Clamence confesses. Half the book is taken up with showing us what a wonderful and caring person Clamence had been at the height of his successful career as an attorney in Paris. He helped the blind, took on cases of the poor for no charge, et cetera, et cetera.... It goes on at length.

Due to Clamence not coming to the aide of a woman who commits suicide, his Fall begins. He begins to become aware of his duplicity. He helps people not to help them, but to gain respect, to build himself up. He suddenly feels the glaring reality of his falsity and he hears the laughter which acknowledges his acknowledgment.

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others."

Clamence no longer believes in the speeches he must give in court on justice, law, crime... His descent into hell begins, and it is fairly ugly, though illuminating. There are many philosophical truths Camus strikes upon, yet there is more disillusionment.

The problem with Clamence is that he cannot accept his duplicitous nature. He goes from one polarization to the other, never finding a balance, but rather a comfortable position. He sees paradox as ridiculous, yet cannot escape it. In trying to do so, he becomes ridiculously tragic.

Paradox saturates our world to keep us from polarization. Clamence would lose much of his seething cynicism should he stop drinking gin. The gin philosopher is indeed, a false prophet. What do we gain from listening to false prophets? If we know not that they are false prophets, we lose much and chances are they know not that they are a false prophet. Clamence however, being a Judge-Penitent, confesses to us before we confess to him—that he is a false prophet.

The danger in this is losing oneself further into the abyss. How much more dangerous is the man who knows he is falling than the man who is falling and does not know it? Certainly the latter will not be as desperate or as illuminated.

This is a complex and shallow book. It ends on a sinister note. I believe that Jean-Baptiste Clamence was on the verge of death from alcoholism. After the woman who committed suicide awakened him to his reality, he goes on a dangerous voyage of self exploration, and at the end denies the importance of life and is happy that he did not save the woman's life. He traveled the circle of hell, ended upon the spot he started out on, and remains inside the circle. ( )

Purely amazing work. I like that Camus was able to treat the reader as an educated person rather than a child who needed their hand held by a terrible plot. ( )

After finishing the Math history ‘Prime Obsession’ I picked up “The Fall” by Albert Camus. I think I understood the math in ‘Prime Obsession’ better than the philosophy in “The Fall”. The character labeled ‘Clamence’ whose ‘real’ identity is questionable has an ego the size of New York City but the style of a Parisian Hedonist. Pontificating with philosophical ruminations on the nature of good and evil and our relationship not so much with those two ‘qualities’ (good and…) but with the schema we have constructed within which to place these two labels. I think the character suggested that without criminals to prosecute, society’s moral framework would become a joke. (Because we are all guilty; it is just that with criminals being the objects upon which we project ‘the bad’ and the foil with which we construct our own innocence.) Albert Camus had me scratching my head and wishing I might sit in with a student seminar on French Literature of the fifties so that I could get a better handle on the meat of the book. At one point ‘Clamence’ becomes descriptive of the Paris around him and I relax and start to enjoy the prose when suddenly ‘Clamence’ catches himself being lyrical and castigates himself before getting back to what really matters. I guess I’d better go Google Camus. ( )

I loved L'etranger and La peste but did not come to terms with La chute except for its atmospheric grey, black and yellow Livre de Poche cover design. I let someone borrow my Livre de Poche copy of L'etranger and surprise, surprise never got it back. it cost me 1 franc in Chambery.